The challenge is this: When a recession comes, rather than surrendering, what can we do to empower ourselves and create a better life? What technologies can we use and how? How can we use information in a more powerful way? To whom should we look as the new role models and the new heroes? How can we turn inward and improve who we are and how we organize our internal personal worlds? This book is about the power of the individual to make a difference and also to change an entire world, whether or not the supposed economic forces are on your side. To thrive in an era that produces and devours information like never before, you need to become more adept at finding, sorting, and absorbing ideas, news, and all kinds of data. The age of the infovore has arrived.
One strong feature of autism is the tendency of autistics to impose additional structure on information by the acts of arranging, organizing, classifying, collecting, memorizing, categorizing, and listing. Autistics are information lovers to an extreme degree and they are the people who engage with information most passionately. When it comes to their areas of interest, autistics are the true infovores, as I call them. Autistics are sometimes portrayed as soulless zombies, but in fact they are the ones with the strongest interest in human codes of meaning.
Behavioral economists sometimes write of human beings as subject to “framing effects,” meaning that the presentation of the alternatives influences our choices. For instance we often choose more conservatively if the very same opportunity is described to us as a gain of something rather than as a loss of something. Or the presence of a very-high-calorie item on a menu—which we don’t order—makes us feel less guilty about later getting dessert. Usually the presumption is that framing effects are to be avoided. To be sure, many framing effects are irrational but framing effects help put the guts into our lives. We spend time and energy framing things in the right way so that we can enjoy them more or learn more from them. Framing helps us care and it gives meaning to our experiences.
In essence we are using tools and capital goods—computers and the web—to replicate or mimic some of the information-absorbing, information-processing, and mental-ordering abilities of autistics. You’ll read or hear some speculative claims about how using the web is “changing our brains,” or rewiring our brains, through the medium of neuroplasticity, but my message is more straightforward. The web allows us to borrow cognitive strengths from autism and to be better infovores, even if it doesn’t rearrange any of the wiring between our ears.
The basic idea behind the new web innovations is to take a blooming, buzzing mass of overwhelming confusion—modern information, in its richness and glory—and impose some local coherence on it, thereby turning it into usable form. That process reflects how we cope every day.
I would like to consider three stylized facts about today’s world and put them together into a single coherent vision. The facts are the following: Culture is much cheaper and more accessible than before; we engage in more and more cultural sampling; and many intelligent people complain about how ugly contemporary culture has become. Those may sound like separate phenomena but they can be tied together with some basic, intuitive economics. When that unified picture is complete, we will see that our modern world is just a bit more glorious than it is usually given credit for.
When access is easy, we tend to favor the short, the sweet, and the bitty. When access is difficult, we tend to look for large-scale productions, extravaganzas, and masterpieces. Through this mechanism, costs of access influence our interior lives. There are usually both “small bits” and “large bits” of culture within our grasp. High costs of access shut out the small bits—they’re not worthwhile—and therefore shunt us toward the large bits. Low costs of access give us a diverse mix of small and large bits, but in relative terms, it is pretty easy to enjoy the small bits.
The trend toward shorter bits of culture makes it easier to try new things. If you are taking items in bit by bit the tendency is to indulge your desire to sample. It’s hard to sample if you’re committed to reading a ten-volume history but easy to sample if most of your cultural experiences are short or small. Small cultural bits have never been easier to enjoy, record, store, and order, and as I have stated we have become infovores who love to try out and experience new bits of information as much as we possibly can. The very pleasure of anticipating and trying—for its own sake—further encourages the new culture of small bits. When it comes to culture, a lot of the pleasure comes from the opening and unwrapping of the gift, so to speak. So you want to be trying new things all the time so you have something to look forward to and so you have the thrill of ongoing discovery.
I get a kick from starting a book and I also get kick from finishing a book. I want to start and finish more books. We like arbitrary markers of progress and psychological reinforcements, so successful media for delivering culture must offer both of these.
So the quest for the pleasures of starting and finishing again cause us to seek out the smaller cultural bits.
OK, so we have a culture of ever smaller and ever more numerous bits; what does this mean? The typical answer is that we are experiencing information overload and a knowledge glut. Nonetheless, while it is easy to observe apparent overload in our busy lives, the underlying reality is subtler. The common word is “multitasking” but I would sooner point to the coherence in your mind than regard it as a jumbled or chaotic blend. The coherence lies in the fact that you are getting a steady stream of information to feed your long-run attention. No matter how disparate the topics may appear to an outside viewer, most parts of the stream relate to your passions, your interests, your affiliations, and how it all hangs together. At its core it’s all about you and that is indeed a favorite topic for many people. Now, more than ever, you can assemble and manipulate bits of information from the outside world and relate them back to your personal concerns.
A lot of critics charge that multitasking makes us less efficient; I’ve read that periodically checking your email lowers your cognitive performance to the level of the inebriated. If these claims were true in general, multitasking would disappear pretty rapidly as a way of getting things done. When it comes to enjoying and assembling small cultural bits, multitasking is remarkably efficient. It is very often a dominant method of (interior) production and of course that is why it is so popular. The emotional power of our personal blends is potent, and they make work, and learning, a lot more fun. Multitasking is, in part, a strategy to keep ourselves interested.
Our cultural focus on small bits doesn’t mean we are neglecting the larger picture. Rather, small bits are building blocks for seeing and understanding some larger trends and narratives. The stereotypical web activity is not to visit a gardening blog one day, visit a Manolo shoes blog the next day, and never return to either. Most online activity, or at least the kinds that persist, is investment in sustained, long-running narratives. That is where the suspense comes from and that is why the internet so holds our attention. Nicholas Carr, in a 2008 article in The Atlantic, asked, “Is Google making us stupid?” and basically he answered that yes, Google is making us stupid. He argued that internet culture shortens our attention spans and renders us less likely to think deep thoughts. But he missed how people can construct wisdom—and long-term dramatic interest in their own self-education—from accumulating, collecting, and ordering small bits of information. What we’re growing impatient with is bits that are fed to us and that we do not really want.
Our growing preference for small cultural bits enhances our understanding of the beauty of the broader human story, even though not every part of the outside world looks so pretty. Our new internal beauties are harder for outsiders to spot than are the fantastic cathedrals of old Europe.
In short, our contemporary culture has become more like marriage in the sense that we are trading in some peak experiences for a better daily state of mind. Culture has in some ways become uglier because that is how the self-assembly of small bits looks to the outside observer. But when it comes to the interior dimension, contemporary culture has become happier and more satisfying. And, ultimately, it has become nobler as well and more appreciative of the big-picture virtues of human life. Many critics of contemporary life want our culture to remain like a long-distance relationship, with thrilling peaks, when most of us are growing into something more mature. We are treating culture like a self-assembly of small bits, and we are creating and committing ourselves to a fascinating daily brocade, much as we can make a marriage into a rich and satisfying life. We are better off for this change and it is part of a broader trend of how the production of value—including beauty, suspense, and education—is becoming increasingly interior to our minds.
McLuhan and his followers were fond of pointing out that television was a “cool” medium because the viewer had to fill in a lot of the content, while print was a “hot” medium because it didn’t involve a lot of reader participation. What’s happened is that print—in the broad sense of that term—has become a cool medium also in McLuhan’s sense of the term. Today, print isn’t just letters on a page; by clever use of electronic delivery media, you can create more context and make your messages more personal, emotionally richer, and more evocative in subtle ways. Counterintuitively, it is the very possibility of distance through the print medium that enables small variations in the message, designed to communicate small but important variations in emotional meaning.
In a world of cheap and readily available culture, the medium matters more than ever before. It matters for how we order information and it also matters for what gets ordered. Look at it this way: When it comes to messages, you are constructing a bundle of the message itself and the means of its delivery. The cheaper the content, the more the costs and the methods of delivery matter in shaping your decisions to communicate. You might think it is counterintuitive that a small change in technology can matter so much. IM is only slightly easier to use than email. How hard was it to send an email in the first place? Very hard, it turns out, at least in relative terms. When you send information by IM the window for conversation is already open. You don’t need that extra click to open the new email window and you don’t need the extra half second for it to open. It turns out that very slight difference in extra speed and convenience makes a big difference for human communication.
Micro-blogging fills in the gaps. Too often I’ve had a periodic conversation with a friend or family member and been reduced to reciting the latest “news,” as if it were a series of bullet headlines. Micro-blogging recognizes that the ordinary fabric of daily life—the small bits of existence—is a big part of “what’s new.” Rather than being impersonal, it brings people together. If someone is reading your tweets and they ask “What’s new?” all of a sudden the conversation can take place in a thicker and richer context. The conversation can be emotional and evocative rather than sounding like CNN. It’s another example of how mastering some small bits can give you a richer, bigger perspective on the world.
If you’re micro-blogging all the time, you are forced to be more philosophical about what you are doing. Which little event from today is the one I want to list? And how should I describe it? What about the event was really important? Those may sound like stupid questions but micro-blogging is making many of us more contemplative and more thoughtful.
If you want to make better decisions, you should be more self-reflective about how you are choosing to frame the messages you send and receive. You should think more about who you listen to and who you read.
Buddhism does identify some very real costs and biases of mental ordering. If we engage in too much mental ordering—fun though it may be—we can lose sight of “the whole” and we can lose sight of the path toward greater harmony within ourselves. And yes, mental ordering can lead us to frustration, in part because the order is never completed. Or if the order were completed we might feel unfulfilled or disappointed, just as when we finally collect every baseball card for a given year of play. The Buddhist critique, however, does not provide a larger-scale refutation of mental ordering. Mental ordering is important in ways that are not emphasized adequately in Buddhist philosophy, namely: Mental ordering is very often a joy. There is a multiplicity of paths toward freedom, and mental ordering can be one of them; it is one way of realizing individual autonomy. We use mental ordering to establish intense, emotional connections with other people, such as when we go on Facebook and order our friends, photos, and experiences. The brain is not infinitely plastic, so many people will experience above-average levels of specialized mental ordering as part of their destinies; we should accept this tendency and build on its strengths rather than always working to overcome it or eliminate it.
There has been a fundamental shift in the balance of power between consumers and salesmen over the last generation and it points in the direction of consumers. The quantity and quality of “interior” pleasures is higher than ever before, so many people shift more toward these very cheap entertainments. Because of this rise of interiority, we’re saving money on our learning and entertainment and we’re also telling ourselves more stories. Stories are a big part of how we think, but do we really learn from them or are they just entertainments? Should you embrace your tendency to use the narrative mode or should you be suspicious of it?
One of the most fundamental truths about the social world is that objective reality does not determine what people believe. Or in the language of economics, expectations are not generally rational. People misperceive reality or people self-deceive to construct a more pleasant reality within their own minds. Or sometimes we prefer the tragic, such as when we tune in to watch Lassie die. Maybe some people are just plain flat-out unable to figure out how things work. Most significantly, we interpret real-world evidence through our stories and through the internal ordering imposed by our minds.
Although analyzing stories is prominent in what is called “narrative psychology,” the notion of stories has yet to have much impact on behavioral economics, even though most people love to think in terms of stories. Most people are programmed to think in terms of stories and they have an especially good memory for stories. “The economics of stories” is one of the next frontiers in social science but most economists are still behind the curve, with the exception of course of Thomas Schelling. Once you consider the power of stories, the traditional economist’s notion of scarcity becomes inverted. Traditional economics is usually about acquiring things and thus overcoming scarcity, but a lot of human behavior is about creating artificial scarcity and then choosing a quest. Quests, which I define as stories of overcoming scarcity, require at least two kinds of scarcity. First, if you want to go on a meaningful quest, you must be lacking in something. Second, the protagonist cannot focus on everything and thus must choose and discard priorities to define a preferred quest. Stories and quests are very old and time-honored methods of mental ordering. But the ordering isn’t just about arranging a set of given units or concerns, as you might file a collection of baseball cards. Discarding and whittling down are fundamental features of this ordering process, which has something in common with cleaning out an old bureau. Stories aren’t just about creating context and building. Stories also require us to take away or eliminate material to make the resulting pieces cohere, stick in our minds, and constitute a plot based on a struggle to achieve something. In essence the new cultural economics is about how corporate marketing and individual self-assembly combine to create stories of meaning based on quests, scarcity, and uncertainty.
In a mental universe with no story-based hierarchical principles, you’re a hungry and ravenous being trying to own or consume as many commodities or bits of information as possible. In a story-based view, in contrast, very often you already have more bits than you know what to do with. We whittle away at the thicket of information and organize some bits in the form of narratives, even if that means we end up with fewer bits overall. In this vision of how we create mental value, the economic problem is again what to toss away—and how to order what is left—and not just what to acquire. An “economics of stories” gives the notion of mental ordering a central importance. Of course the richer we become, the more likely our predicament is one of finding the proper ordering rather than just acquiring more. We have access to lots more “stuff” than ever before, if only through the internet, but our available time does not rise in proportion. So again we organize goods, services, and events into favored stories and jettison that which does not fit.
Story-based thinking, while fun, has its problematic side. I see the following problems with socially salient stories:
PROBLEM #1: THE STORIES ARE TOO SIMPLE. The shallowness of many commonly told and commonly held stories is part of the price of our sociability and the need to share so much with so many other people. Sometimes that oversimplification is a price worth paying. But let’s recognize it for what it is, namely a cognitive bias that plagues how many people think about the world.
PROBLEM #2: STORIES END UP SERVING DUAL AND CONFLICTING FUNCTIONS. Stories need to be focal and they need to be strongly imprinted on our minds. That means we can’t just jump from one story to another at will. Bravery is an overall temperament that cannot be turned on and off like a switch. Our personal stories therefore involve some “stickiness,” if I may borrow some terminology from macroeconomics. The world, or our immediate environment, changes more quickly than our stories can adjust. In the meantime we can be very vulnerable indeed.
PROBLEM #3: MARKETS DON’T ALWAYS SEND US THE RIGHT STORIES OR REINFORCE THE RIGHT STORIES. The world is sending you stories with a skewed perspective. Because of the influence of ads and popular culture, there is a risk that our personal narratives can become too aspirational, too commercial, and too linked to specific brands. We are also too susceptible to government propaganda.
I’ll do a flip on Nozick’s original intentions. The question of the experience machine, properly specified and construed, puts a self-constructed mental economy squarely on the map as one value that matters and as one value that is undervalued in many circumstances. To be honest, many of my friends have not read Moby-Dick but I think many more of them should indulge in this fantasy of the quest for the white whale. That is, unless they have three small children running around the house. Many of us are too reluctant to step (part-time) into literary fantasy machines rather than too ready. Isn’t our general tendency to clutch at the thought of reality just one more instance of the illusion that we are always in control? I say let’s put down our polemic against living in our heads and let’s put down our bias against interiority. Let’s give our stories their proper due but also recognize the limits of stories. The quality and vitality of our internal economies—and thus the quality and vitality of our society—depends on it.
We should drop many of our presuppositions about “low-quality” or “depraved” artistic tastes. When people have tastes that are different from ours, maybe they are perceiving and experiencing something that we do not. Or maybe they are not blinded by something filling our eyes and ears or by our automatic cognitive “editors.”
Our particular neurology doesn’t lock us into a particular set of artistic tastes. Individuals can learn to appreciate the cognitive skills and also the aesthetic perspectives of others, but first they need to know something is there to be appreciated. They need to know that strange and different kinds of music are not just a lot of phoney baloney. Sociological approaches to cultural taste often imply that taste differences are contrived, artificial, or reflect wasteful status-seeking. The result is that we appreciate taste differences less than we might and we become less curious. Neurological approaches imply that different individuals perceive different cultural mysteries and beauties. You can’t always cross the gap to understand the other person’s point of view, but at the very least you know something is there worth pursuing.
There is no full or satisfactory account of what autistics are doing when they focus on favored objects in such a manner. But in part autistics seem to be appreciating some aesthetic qualities of these objects, without the intermediation of what non-autistics would normally call works of art. The autistics are cutting through to the underlying beauties of form, color, texture, and so on without requiring a mainstream, socially constructed context in between themselves and those qualities of interest. These autistics live in a joyous and plentiful artistic world, but because their enjoyment relies less on social intermediation and formal canons of taste and interpretation, that enjoyment is harder for others to perceive. The gap here is not a simple one of “autistics vs. non-autistics.” Remember there is a great deal of variety of perceptual skills across autistics. For that reason, if no other, each autistic is likely to focus on varying objects for his or her aesthetic preferences. The preferences of one autistic will not necessarily be intelligible, in specific terms, to the understanding of another autistic. For that reason there is not an “autistic cultural canon” to stand alongside the non-autistic cultural canons. The lack of such a canon may look like a weakness but it also can be viewed as a strength: Aesthetic appreciation through the lens of a canon is optional for autistics. Maybe a cultural canon is a kind of perceptual crutch, or a device for framing, which many autistics simply don’t need. As I’ve mentioned, the autistics are in this regard closer to some ideas in Buddhism; they can see the beauty of the universe in very small or very particular objects.
I believe that autistics are especially well equipped to appreciate modes of political thinking that are cosmopolitan and legalistic (in the sense of favoring rule of law), and more broadly the notion of a pragmatic “politics without romance.” I would like to offer some admittedly speculative perspectives on these questions.
I have noticed that self-aware autistics are especially likely to be cosmopolitans in their thinking. That is, they tend to attach weaker moral importance to the boundaries of the nation state than do most other people. I view the relative lack of cosmopolitan sympathies as a bias held by others and a case where the autistic perception, if I may call it that, is closer to being the correct one. Since war has been very costly in human history, I view the benefits of the less biased cosmopolitan perspective as significant. Much of this cosmopolitan tendency is rooted in experience rather than cognition. Most autistics have lots of experience with being the “out group” when it comes to “in vs. out” confrontations or social settings. That makes them naturally suspicious of political persecutions, extreme forms of patriotism, and groupthink. Autistics are in any case less synchronized with mainstream social fads, as we have seen.
When it comes to political theory, my expectation is twofold. First, autistics are attracted to simple and straightforward codes of ethics, applied universally to all human beings. Apart from autistic cosmopolitanism and autistic objectivity, it also may stem from a greater willingness to question whether socially common exceptions to the rules are justified. Second, I suspect that a subgroup of autistics has a relatively easy time accepting or grasping ideas about constitutions, rules-based approaches to social order, legal reasoning as it is written down, and the long-term impersonal benefits of the rule of law. Appreciating the abstract operation of any mechanism, whether a watch, a machine, an economy, or a polity (or atonal music; see the previous chapter), is quite difficult. We should expect to find that skill in relative or disproportionate surplus among groups that have a comparative advantage in understanding ordered, abstract mechanisms. Appreciating the practical benefits of a free society—at a high level of abstraction—may be correlated (loosely) with autism in the same way that math or engineering or clock repair skills are. Some small subgroup of autistics is especially likely to have those skills, even if autistics as a whole usually do not. Again, the claim is not that autistics are “more this way on average.” Instead cognitive specialization and varied cognitive skills will put autistics into various intellectual nooks and crannies, in a wide variety of directions, political or otherwise.
What has gone wrong with many of the non-free societies in today’s world is a lack of adherence to abstract rules of behavior and a lack of understanding of such rules as beneficial abstract mechanisms. A country where people do not wait in line in orderly fashion, or where the drivers do not stay in their lanes, is usually a country with serious economic and political problems. It is instructive to compare rule-following behavior in Chile and Argentina. In Chile people are far more likely to obey the laws and to obey the unspoken rules, and they make these decisions of their own accord without the prospect of immediate reward or punishment. You cannot bribe a policeman and most drivers follow the rules of the road. Overall the country is remarkably non-corrupt, especially compared to its neighbors, including Argentina. Chile is also more prosperous than Argentina and for some time now its political life has been more stable and also freer. Contemporary Chile is by most accounts the most successful society in Latin America. In most Latin American countries—but not Chile—the system of income tax collection does not function. You can argue about whether rule-following behavior is the cause or effect of the Chilean success but probably it is both. A list of the most successful societies in the world usually would include the United Kingdom, the Nordic countries, Japan, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Rule-governed behavior is a paramount idea and indeed ideal in each of these societies.
Perhaps advanced civilizations are not very exhibitionistic but instead they look to perfect their interior dimensions. They look for happiness, understanding, order, profundity, and beauty, and they find all of these qualities internally. At some level of technology there is no point to building bigger structures or manipulating exploding stars. After all, if your civilization is advanced enough, what is the point of size? Rather than making themselves bigger and more visible, advanced civilizations may try to make themselves smaller, less visible, and thus more robust. These civilizations will devote their wisdom and energies to digging inward and exploring the life of the mind. After all, it is bigger, expansionistic civilizations that are going to collide or serve as targets for more advanced competitors. Perhaps galactic evolution and competition favor the small, just as insects seem to be doing so well here on planet Earth. What about the notion of a “civilization” that uses information and energy so efficiently that it can fit inside the head of a pin or an even smaller space? We wouldn’t expect to find a visible trace of their existence. Many people overlook this possibility precisely because they expect to find intelligence in familiar forms and in familiar packages. In fact it’s a bit like how the cognitive strengths of autistic people, especially those who do not behave according to mainstream standards in mainstream society, are overlooked.